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Comment by freetanga | Hacker News Reader

I think the genre has gotten smaller, but higher quality. Games are more a work of love than a marketing hype.

Thimbleweed Park, Kathy Rain, whispers of a machine, Disco Elyseum, Unusual Findings, Sexy Brutale, Darside Detective, blacksad, obra-dimm, takes two, Orwell, unheard, shadows of a doubt, 12 minutes…

I actually enjoy these slow-burn games a lot

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Don't forget Wadjet Eye's entire catalog, including the Blackwell series and especially Primordia, Resonance, and Technobabylon.

Resonance will always be quite funny to me. You start the game as a dorky blond named Ed who unravels a government conspiracy with worldwide ramifications.

Only a few weeks after the game's release date was announced, we heard a dorky blond named Ed speak from a hotel room in Hong Kong.

To be entirely fair, the guy who wrote this article CREATED Thimbleweed Park.

I know. And while I have lots of respect for him, I felt the ending was a bit meh

Meh is an understatement. The ending was terrible.

Gameplay was great to that point though.

The ending was uninspiring at best unlike the rest which is very enjoyable.

That's exactly how I felt about Escape from Monkey Island. The gameplay was great (although the 3D graphics were awful...), but the ending completely ruined it.

Just so it doesn’t seem that unanimous, I feel always obligated to say that I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park’s ending as well as Return to Monkey Island’s ending. RtMI ending actually grows in me each time I think or read about it. I consider now to be one of the best endings I ever saw in a game (I do not play that many games though)

Was disappointed also by the ending of Monkey Island 2 and Return to Monkey Island. Ron Gilbert seems to love going meta and breaking the fourth wall to the point where I'd almost be shocked if he released a game that didn't do that.

sounds like you need a game where the protagonist is clearly trying to break the 4th wall, but can't. It's a puzzle you need to figure out.

I do agree the quality has increased significantly; we view old adventure games through quite a bit of rose-tint and tend to ignore significant warts. To add to your great selection, I think the whole Blackwell series is a modern adventure game masterpiece.

Adding these titles into the mix:

- Hugo's House of Horrors

- Maniac Mansion

- The Goonies II

- The Cave

- Machinarium / Botanicula / Samorost (put together because they're, at their core, the same idea.)

- Love you to bits.

And I think these also give that adventure story feel (find objects & solve puzzles to progress a story), even if they don't transport the player to far-away locations

- The Room series

- There is no game

- The Rusty Lake series

- The Stanley Parable

- Tangle Tower

- Chuchel

Hugo's House of Horrors -> That game commits pretty much every sin in the list.

Machinarium / Botanicula / Samorost / Chuchel are all great fun (and can be played with relatively young kids even)

I give HHH a pass, it is still fun and predates Monkey Island 1 and the list itself.

MI2 also break's Ron's own rules ... extensively, including a bunch of things he didn't list that should also be rules, like "don't use a deus ex machina as an ending device" (which he did again in Return to Monkey Island, he's absolutely butchered that IP.)

I’m looking forward to see it how modern language models can improve these games.

One peeve I’ve always had is that in a game like disco elysium, I don’t feel like I (the player) am solving a mystery because dialogue trees are always leading you to the answer. Instead I’m just watching the guy on the screen solve it. Dialogue with an explicit tree would be rad

Games like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Case of the Golden Idol may give you exactly that feeling.

> blacksad

Is that based on the comic?

I think so, never heard of the comic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksad

Yes it's based on the comic and absolutely worth playing if you like me love the comic.

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